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Saturday, October 09, 2010

Scuba Diving in Sydney

I undertook the PADI Open Water Scuba diving course at Absyss Sydney, Australia. The course worked out great because it was a 2 day in-water training which could be completed on a weekend. I booked it rt after figuring out that I was in Sydney for one more weekend and I was very excited about the same.

The anxiety started right after I got the email from Abyss about the preparation for the in water training:
1) Dive Medical
2) E-Learning Module

I learned later that the signup etc did mention about both of them, but of course I didn't read the terms and conditions properly. Anyway Dive medical is a very Australian only thing, so you may not have to worry about it elsewhere.

The e-Learning course was kinda long and time consuming specially when I only had one week to finish it. It took about 8-10 hours as suggested. The course was quite interesting as I revised lot of usual stuff about Buoyancy, pressure/density relationship etc. that was taught in science classes at school.

The actual training takes 2 days, which I choose to be weekend. The first day was testing of basic swimming skills, learning basic scuba diving apparatus handling and a dive at the end. The dive was at Bare Island and the water was kinda rough but it still turned out to be quite fun, must have seen about 8-10 different fishes and we went about 7 Mts down at max depth.

The next day was more or less all diving day, they had 3 dives each about 40-50 minutes duration leaving aside the initial preparation and instructions time.

Overall it was a lot of fun and I plan to do it again ASAP. I got my certificate/diving license from PADI within 3 weeks of completing of course. Somehow diving isn't so big here in San Francisco so I will have to wait.

All our dives were at Bear Island which is a beautiful place to visit even otherwise, its the place where the Mission Impossible 1 bike clash scene was done at.